


Pour Away the Ocean

by celinamarniss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series - Aaron Allston & Michael Stackpole
Genre: 5 Times, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Sad Ending, Space Pirates, filling in the gaps in canon, i have no idea how space piracy would actually work, it's fake and it's in space, smuggling for fun and profit, space pirates AND sea pirates, star wars mothers deserve better, the most canon-compliant thing i've ever written?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-14 23:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15400410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celinamarniss/pseuds/celinamarniss
Summary: Before she married Booster and gave birth to Mirax, Jysella Terrik lived her own story.





	Pour Away the Ocean

**Author's Note:**

> This is the entire Wook entry on Jysella Terrik, who isn’t even named in the books: 
> 
>  
> 
> _Jysella Terrik was the wife of Booster Terrik and mother to Mirax Terrik. She died when Mirax was just a child. Jysella Horn, one of Mirax's children, was named after her. Although mentioned in several sources, the mother of Mirax and wife of Booster has never been officially named until the release of the sourcebook Scum and Villainy in 2008._
> 
>  
> 
> I've written about Jysella before, in _Two Smugglers Walk into a Bar._ She suffers the same fate as most Star Wars mothers, and has been dead for years before the Terriks are introduced in the X-Wing books. Booster and Mirax are fun characters, and I like to think that Jysella could hold her own when she was alive. 
> 
> The title comes from the W. H. Auden poem “Funeral Blues.” The poem is a little maudlin for my tastes, but I was looking for a requiem for sailors, and that line seemed to fit.

**_“Five,” she gasps out, her voice wavering. She shouldn’t speak, but she’s never let what she shouldn’t do stop her before._ **

 

“That _hurts,”_ Jysella whines as her sister yanks harder as she pulls together strands of hair into a tight braid that runs along the side of Jysella’s head.

Sellia smacks her and continues to pull at her hair. “Stop whining,” she hisses.

Jysella knows that her small, dark eyes will nearly disappear if she scrunches up her plump cheeks and lets fat, wet tears fall. As Sellia tugs harder the tears come easy. She lets loose a sob that makes her chin wobble.

“Mama,” Jysella whimpers. “Sellia’s _hurting_ me.”

“Sellia. Be gentle with her.” Mama sits at her desk, going over figures, her belly round with Jysella’s baby brother. She doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s working.

“She’s just being a baby—”

 _“Sellia,”_ Mama says sharply.

Sellia loosens her hold on Jysella’s hair, and Jysella stops sniveling.

“Someday your little cons aren’t going to work anymore,” Sellia hisses in her ear.

 _“Gatza,”_ Jysella calls her. It’s a word she picked up playing with the Yen boys, and she likes the way it sounds, hard against her tongue.

“Say that again,” Sellia says, her tone low and hard.

Jysella senses the trap and presses her lips together.

Sellia isn’t going to let it go. “Mama, Jysella said _gatza.”_

From across the room, Mama lets out a gusty sigh. “Get out of here, both of you. Go take her down the docks, Sellia. And if I hear that you’ve been fighting with the Yen boys I’ll have a hand for both of you.”

They go down to the docks.

The port city of Zytho is always grey, the sky flat and grim, except for when storms clouds rolled through, bringing heavy blankets of rain. Jysella’s seen holos of planets where there’s sunshine every day, and of deserts where there isn’t any rain at all, but those places are hard to imagine as a fine drizzle sweeps across the city and dusts their faces and the tops of their hooded coats.

Jysella runs ahead, into the market that abuts the docks, dodging through rows of fish hung out for sale, some on beds of ice and others hanging from poles like kites that fail to catch the wind. She wrinkles her nose at the smell and waves to the fisherpeople she likes. Most of them are Selonian ladies; tall, with beautiful sleek brown fur. They speak together in a language she doesn’t understand and their strange laughter rattles over the market stalls.

Beyond the fish market, the docks begin. Further down is a wide berth for luxury yachts and cruise ships, and even further down, the big industrial shipping port. Jysella isn’t allowed to play there. She heads for the rows of small boats linked to a maze of floating piers, her arms flapping as she scrambles down the steps of the quay.

“Careful, Jysa, it’s slippery!” Sellia calls after her, and then, more sullenly: “I’m not pulling you out of the water again.”

The red and orange banner of Corellia and the blue diamond of Talus decorate hulls and snap in the wind. Jysella has been taught that Talus is the Third Brother in the Corellian system, which means that it is the third planet from the sun, after Corellia and Drall, and before Tralus and Selonia. Selonia might be the biggest planet in the system, and Corellia might be the richest, but Jysella knows in her heart that Talus the _best_ planet in the system. Everyone she knows has said so.

Jysella runs along the dock to the boat where the big Aqualish lady who always gives her candied kappa lives. Later, she and Sellia sit at the edge of the dock, sucking on candied kappa and watching the flat-eyed gobbo fish darting back and forth in the water below.

Their father’s ship, _Krakana,_ has been out on the sea for weeks, hunting in the shipping lanes that run North and South out of Zytho. If CorSec doesn’t catch him, he’ll come home with goods to sell on the black market and treats for his family.

“What do you think Papa will bring us this time?”

Sellia tilts her head, purses her lips. “New holos from Corellia. The ones that haven’t arrived here yet. Maybe the new one about the Mandalorian duchess.”

“I want a bag of Coronet star candy!”

“Always thinking about candy,” Sellia scoffs. “Maybe he won’t bring you anything. Maybe he’ll just bring toys for the new baby.”

Jysella glares at Sellia, but secretly, she’s alarmed. The thought her father might bring treats for the baby that hadn’t even arrived yet, and forget about her completely, had never occurred to her before.

Sellia smirks. “Don’t worry, Jysa, he won’t forget you.”

Jysella still pouts, jutting out her lower lip. Sellia pinches Jysella’s side, and when Jysella shrieks and tries to kick her, Sellia offers her another stick of candy to keep her quiet.

When it begins to get dark and Jysella’s stomach starts to rumble like a skiff engine, they head back home along streets glimmering with evening rain.

 

**_“Four.” She was always in danger of paying the price for the life she lives, and she walked onto this ship with her eyes open._ **

 

Jysella smoothes her hands down the front of the gown and does a little half turn in front of the mirror. The dress is heavy, with a wide skirt the blooms out from Jysella’s waist and falls to her toes. The stiff fabric is a shimmering silver-blue, the most popular color of the season on Coruscant. Jysella decides it’s her new favorite color. The dress is worth more than a Talus fisherman would make in a year, and the silver headband on Jysella’s head would pay for an entire semester at the Corellian Academy, if it weren't a fake. The dress was stolen.

In the mirror Jysella sees her mother’s dark eyes and her father’s narrow nose and thin smile. The fine, dark hair that could have come from either side of the family is piled in elaborate braids on top of her head, held in place by the heavy headband. It looks like a crown. Jysella loves it.

Twice a year, the luxury cruise ship _The Corellian Princess_ makes a stop at the Zytho docks on its way south to warmer climes. There’s a big party scheduled before the ship casts off, when all the rich passengers drink and dance on the dock all evening. All Jysella has to do is slip past security and mingle among the guests as if she belongs there.

After midnight, when the party on the dock ends, the passengers all reboard the ship before it casts off. In her silver-blue dress, Jysella will be lost in the crowd like a wasp fish in a school of gobbo. Once the ship leaves Zytho and heads down the coast, she’ll sneak down to the engine room and plant the pulse detonator that will kill the ship’s power and leave it drifting, ready for her father’s ship, _Krakana,_ to come hunting.

Jysella is fifteen. She knows that learning how to jack a ship isn’t something most teenage girls her age do; _most_ of the fifteen-year-olds she knows are working the docks or stuck in the canning factories. The Republic has labor laws, but of course no-one pays much attention to them out here, and everyone has to eat.

She’s _so_ lucky.

“You look perfect,” her father says, putting his big hands on her shoulders.

“Thank you, Papa,” Jysella says, grinning and twisting her hips so that the wide skirt twirls back and forth.

“Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, Papa.”

He smiles at her. “Time to go, Jysa.” The entire crew is relying on her.

She slinks into the party behind a well-dressed family that looks a little like hers, and the security droids assume that she’s part of the group. It’s that easy.

She’s surrounded on all sides by the richest and most privileged members of Talus society: women in meticulously tailored dresses in shimmering silvery blue, Dralls dripping with jewels, suited gentlemen with personal protocol droids hovering at their elbows and Selonians with shining, elegantly coiffed fur.

She wishes that Sellia were here with her. Sellia is the smart one, smart enough to win a scholarship and leave Talus to study for a degree in starship engineering on Corellia. She misses her sister, though she never admits it to her sister’s ghostly, translucent holo whenever Sellia calls home. Sellia would know exactly what to say if someone asks her a question about current events in the Galactic Senate or top spaceship designers on Coruscant.

(Jysella is not entirely sure what rich people talk about).

She affects the bored expression that the other socialites are wearing, as though the lavish party were just another day at the market. Whenever anyone addresses her she sparkles airily, spouting inane comments until they lose interest and move on. She takes the wine glass a serving droid offers her, because it will help her blend in, but she doesn’t take a sip. Mama has given her strict instructions, and she can’t be tipsy when it comes time to play her part. The wine is a warm amber color and smells like tisiki berries.

She only takes a _little_ sip.

When the departure time arrives, serving droids guide the passengers onto the _Princess,_ and many flock to the rail to wave at the dock as the ship slips away into the night. The party continues on despite the lateness of the hour, revelers spilling out of the ship's big ballroom and onto the deck.

Jysella waits for the ship to lose sight of land, just far enough so that the Zytho coast guard’s response will be sluggish. She waits another hour and then winds her way out of the ballroom and through the guest quarters, and then down past the crew levels to the engine rooms.

Only a few feet into the engine room and she hears someone coming in her direction, feet _thump-thumping_ along the corridor. If she had been caught at the party, she probably would have just been thrown out onto the street, but if she gets caught in the engine room, she’ll end up in a CorSec interrogation room. She’s heard stories from other pirates, and she does _not_ want that to happen.

She jams herself behind a large part of the machinery and goes still, listening as the Drall crewmen scurry down the corridor. They don’t see her or smell her, and she wait for a few minutes until her pounding heart slows down again before she crawls out and heads deeper into the engine room.

One of her older cousins built the pulse detonator hidden in the layers of her dress. It’s boxy and heavy and has been banging against her thigh all night. She fishes it out from under her skirt and keys in the sequence to activate the timer. Her expensive slippers nearly slip on the rusty pipes as she climbs up the side of the engine and attaches it to a control junction. When the timer goes off, the pulse detonator will blow out the engine and several major functions; she has to rig the detonator in just the right place so that it cuts out the power to certain systems and not others. Jsyella studied blueprints of the engine room for weeks before the mission and practiced with a dummy detonator until she knew the sequence by heart.

On her way back up to the top deck she passes several passengers heading to their cabins, having finally had enough of the party, though the ballroom is still half-full when she reaches it. She goes to the deck and stands by the rail, her eyes on the horizon. Grey morning light is beginning to creep across the wide expanse of the ocean. To the north, a fogbank drifts, obscuring her father’s ship from any sharp-eyed lookout droid.

A splash catches her eye and she watches as a shadow rises to the surface of the sea and skims alongside the cruise ship. It’s a pulsar skate, the span of its fins wider than a speeder as it glides through the waves. The graceful fish is good luck, Jysella decides as she watches it coast along the length of the ship and dive into the deep again.

She feels the shudder that goes through the ship as the engine fails. The lights stay on and the passengers don’t even notice. Most have moved inside but a few linger up and down the rail, the red glow of their cigarras blinking up and down the deck.

In the distance, _Krakana_ cuts through the fog and heads toward _The Corellian Princess._ If the power was still running to the bridge, the alarms would be sounding all over the ship, but it sits silent and motionless on the water as _Krakana_ approaches.

Jysella slips back into the ballroom and weaves into the crowd, the remaining partygoers deeply drunk and still completely oblivious to the approaching threat. In here they’re insulated from the panic that will ripple through the _Princess’s_ crew as it becomes obvious that they’re outgunned and dead in the water. She won’t be on deck to see the fight between her relatives and the ship’s security, but she knows that she’ll hear all about it later. She doesn’t even see her family until they’ve subdued the _Princess’s_ crew and invaded the ballroom to round up the rest of the passengers. They all wear helmets that mask their faces, helms spangled with orange Corellian stars and diamond patterns a deep Talus blue.

Papa and Uncle Doman disappear onto the bridge to discuss ransom terms with the captain while her Aunt Subin lines up all the passengers so that her cousins can ransack their rooms for credits. Jysella stands in line with the passengers. A few of the passengers look scared, but most only seem angry. She hears someone in the line mutter something about “security” and tries not to smirk. What she knows, and that the passengers don’t, is that the fleet of speeder skiffs that the ship carries to drive off pirates were never released from their berths, sealed shut when the power went down.

“We will be taking a hostage,” Aunt Subin calls, the mask she wears distorting her voice and giving it a deep, grating register. A long moment follows as she looks up and down the line, as though carefully choosing her mark. “That girl over there.”

That’s her cue.

She’s the picture of a young girl being brave through her fear as she steps forward to face the pirates, her chin lifted and just barely wobbling. She’s practiced in front of a mirror. Hopefully, everyone will be looking at her trembling hands, and not at the long stain of engine grease on the side of her skirt.

There’s murmuring behind her, but no one steps forward to object. “Everyone will be too afraid of getting picked that they won’t say anything at all,” Papa had told her, and he was right.

She follows her cousin Bai and Diric Yen out of the ballroom. _Krakana_ hovers on repulsorlifts above the waves right alongside the _Princess,_ their decks level, linked together by a single durasteel plank the pirates use to move loot across the gap between the ships. Diric guides her carefully over the plank as though she’s still a Talus socialite who’s never been on a _real_ boat in her entire life—one last show in case anyone on board _The Princess_ is still watching.

 _Krakana_ is fragrant with fuel and smoke, as is its crew. Jysella breathes deep, savoring the familiar smell after hours of breathing in heady perfumes that had saturated the partygoers and still clung to her clothes and hair.

The rest of her father’s crew follow, two cousins pulling the plank in behind them. _Kranaka_ breaks away from the  _Princess,_ cutting repulsorlifts so that the ship hits the water and goes shooting forward, waves splashing up onto the deck. She and her cousin Bai go to the rail to lean out over the water as Krakana races toward the horizon.

“What are you going to do with your share?” Bai asks her.

 _Krakana_ dips over a large wave, and Jysella tips her head back and laughs as salt spray spatters across her face. The sodden hem of her dress drags on the deck.

“I’m saving to buy passage off-planet.” It’s been her secret for months, and saying it aloud feels like letting a wish lose for the whole galaxy to hear.

Bai nods; it’s a dream shared by many. “Coronet City?”

“Further.”

 

**_“Three.” She wishes Booster were here. He’s going to kill her for doing this to him and Mirax, he’s going to—_ **

 

Jysella wants Booster Terrik the moment she lays eyes on him.

“I’m going to kriff that man,” she says.

“Of course you are,” Ellios says, deadpan. She looks over at Booster, sniffs dismissively. “Romantic.”

Jysella has her father’s long legs, and she likes men who are taller than her. Booster Terrik is a big man, a head taller than her, broad-shouldered and well-built. A beard, too.

“Pasty-looking,” Ellios comments. Ellios’s skin is a deep blue, so dark it appears purple in the dim lighting of the bar. Her lip curls in distaste. “Too much hair.”

Ellios is kind of a gatza, but Jysella likes that about her.

“All mine, then,” she says, grinning as she clicks the rim of the glass against her teeth.

Ellios makes a rude noise that Jysella ignores in favor of catching Booster’s eye. When he joins them at the bar, Ellios drifts off to chat with a tall Nautolan while she and Booster exchange names and niceties.

“Who are your people?” Booster asks her. When she tells him she’s from Talus, his eyes light up like a kid on his name day and it’s so _damn_ attractive.

His people come from Coronet City, but he doesn’t have any people worth speaking of, he says, and anyway, he hasn’t been back to Corellia in years. They’re both a long way from their home system, though Jysella goes back to see her family every year, she tells him. She decides that she doesn’t care that Booster’s a Coronet City boy; she’ll still kriff him in spite of his unfortunate origins.

He tells her earnestly about the small shipping company he runs, and it’s clear that he’s neglecting to mention the fact that the type of shipping he’s doing can’t possibly be legal in this sector. She neglects to tell him she’s in roughly the same line of business, but frankly, in this dive, who else would he expect to pick him up?

They have a good time. A _very_ good time, she later tells a perpetually unimpressed Ellios.

She doesn’t expect to see Booster Terrik ever again, but then she bumps into him on Ryloth, and _what,_ like she’s _not_ going to bribe the night guard so they can screw in the back of the cargo warehouse?

Then she runs into him on Bestine, and then on Abednado. She’s beginning to think it isn’t a coincidence. She tells herself it doesn’t matter; he’s just a good time.

On Denon they catch up over drinks. She calls down the bar for their order; she already knows what brand of cheap Corellian ale he drinks and how many it takes before he’ll slip an arm around her waist, lean in and murmur a line into her ear about taking their conversation somewhere more private. He’s smiling at her when she turns back around, eyes crinkled and shining, and she winks at him, nudging his knee with hers. Maybe they can go dancing after they get their drinks.

“I’ve got a lead,” he says, slowly and quietly so that only she can hear. “On a Republic supply convoy hauling comlink packs from Bothawui. The convoy makes a micro jump in the Nibiron system.”

 _That_ gets her attention.

There’s no Republic blockade in the Nibiron system, and any military ships that might have run patrols through that sector were pulled out a week ago for some battle on Umbara, but that’s not common knowledge.

Booster must know. “And my source tells me this particular convoy doesn’t have a Jedi commander onboard.” Jedi are rarer than quicksliver fish—she’s never actually seen one in the flesh herself—but everyone knows it’s dangerous to tangle with an enemy that can see into your mind. Not to mention they’re impossible to bribe.

“I’ve got buyers on the other end,” Booster continues. “I’ve been running cargo to a Sep cell on Onderon for months. They could use those comlink packs for their droids. Everything’s lined up just right.”

“You’re a smuggler, not a pirate.”

“True.” Booster always comes straight to the point. It’s one of the things she likes about him. “But even _I_ can see the benefit of not having to pay for the goods I’m smuggling, and it’s not every day a lead like this one comes my way.”

It would be a hell of a job. She’s got no love for the Republic Government, but jacking a Grand Army supply ship and smuggling its cargo across a war zone is bold, especially for a small gang without a syndicate to back it up.

It’s too tempting to pass up, though—liberating cargo from the Republic and selling it to the Separatists, making a profit _and_ supporting the Separatist cause in one fell swoop. Her mind is already spinning out plans and contingency plans: a lure, then a swim-up, followed by an underbelly snatch…

This, _this_ is what she’s meant to do.

“Join my crew,” he says.

“Join mine,” she shoots back. Never mind that currently, her crew consists of herself, a faulty astromech, Ellios, whenever Ellios feels like it, and the occasional cousin who passes through her life. She doesn’t think that his crew is much larger.

It’s more of a merger.

Ellios is the lure. When the convoy stops in the Nibiron system, close to one of the system’s uninhabited gas planets, she broadcasts a distress signal on the other side of the system’s single sun until the supply freighter’s escort breaks away to investigate. Booster’s ship, the _Starwayman,_ waits in the shadow of the planet’s rings. They only have a narrow window of time in which the freighter is unguarded.

Before the convoy left Bothawui Booster paid a dockhand to plant a pulse grenade in a crate in the AA-9 Freighter’s hold. When the pulse grenade goes off the freighter’s engine and sensors go dead. If they notice the small ship that swoops up to their underbelly and attaches to an airlock, there isn’t much they can do about it except send troops to pick them off in the hold.

The _Starwayman_ locks onto the bottom of the cargo ship like a limpet and there’s a hiss and clank as Booster’s Borlovian first mate, Llollulion, disables and opens the airlock.

“You ready?” Booster asks her. 

“Ready for anything, babe.” She flashes him a wild grin before she slips on her Talus-blue pirate’s helm. Booster winks at her before pulling a scarf around his head to obscure his identity. 

Llollulion looks back and forth between them uneasily. In a whirl of feathers and disapproval, he heads back to the cockpit.

Booster leads the way up the ladder, through the airlock between the two ships and into the freighter. Before the war, the AA-9 Freighters were used to transport refugees from Coruscant, and the ships requisitioned for the war effort have been retrofitted to haul cargo to battlefields across the galaxy. The retrofitting was hastily done, and the layout of the cargo hold is enough to make any efficient engineer weep. The control panel that unlocks and lowers the cargo hold’s ramp is on one end of the hold, and the console platform that directs and distributes the cargo is on the other, rather than centralized in a single station. A rickety walkway that runs along the side of the hold wall links the two. A system of conveyor belts on the floor of the hold allow for loading and unloading without the help of droids, and the crates are stacked in orderly rows beside the belt.

They climb up the walkway and head left, toward the console platform that will remotely unlock the crates they plan to steal. 

It doesn’t take long to slice into the system. Jysella locates the shipment of comlink packs, and Booster uploads the code that will tell the system to activate the conveyor belt. It rattles as it starts, the crates slotting onto the belt, and they watch as the cargo they've come for trundle slowly toward the other end of the hold.

Llollulion whistles over the comms.

“Yeah, I know, partner, we’re going as fast as we can,” Booster says.

She hears him suck in a breath as the cargo jolts on the jury-rigged conveyor belt, but jam is momentary and the crates make it to the end of the track. Now they have to make their way back across the walkway, past the airlock and the exit door that lead to the rest of the ship. On the far end of the hold, down a flight of steps and up against the wall of the ship, is the control panel that will open the cargo hold. Jysella doesn't know which engineer failed to reroute the function to the main console, but she's sure the ship's crewmen curse him every time they need to unload a shipment. 

“I’ll go,” Booster says. “Watch my back.”

Jysella stays by the console, ready to hit the release that will jettison the crates out of the hold where the _Starwayman_ can scoop them up as soon as Booser lowers the hold’s ramp.

Minutes tick by as he works at the controls.

“How’s it looking, Booster?” She asks over the comms.

“Worried about me, baby?” His voice is warm in her ear.

“If you get filled with blaster holes I won’t get that drink you promised me on Lothal.”

Booster chuckles. She hears Llollulion whistle something that could be a scold or a warning. Her Borlovian’s lousy.

Over the comms, Ellios says, “Quit flirting and stay on task, _please._ I can only keep the fighters running in circles for so long.”

On the other end of the hold, the ramp begins to lower. Jysella plugs in the sequence that will send the crates past the forcefield as soon as the ramp is completely down. Booster should be making his way back now that the cargo's on its way out of the hold, but she doesn't see him yet. 

She hears the hiss of a door being opened along the walkway. Jysella ducks behind the control station as blaster fire splatters across the hold. The troopers rush in, four clones in identical white armor masking identical faces. The troopers thunder down the walkway toward her and she barely has enough time to shout a warning over the comm. She returns fire from behind the console, but there are more of them than there are of her, and she won’t be able to hold them off for long. She risks a glimpse over the edge of the console, enough to see the crates floating towards the _Starywayman_. A blaster bolt crackles by her head. She can’t see Booster anywhere.

“Llollulion, do you have a lock on the crates?” she yells. 

Llollulion trills a positive over the comm.

“Booster, where are you? Booster— “

They’re on top of her. A trooper rounds the console and kicks her legs out from under her before she has a chance to aim at him. The fall knocks her blaster out of her hand. She screams in rage and punches at the clone’s head as he leans down to try and restrain her, her fist bouncing off the white helmet. He wrenches her arm to the side, pinning it to the ground, and yanks off her helm. He's bigger and heavier, and she can't wriggle loose. She spits at him in spite of the blaster pointed at her head. 

Booster comes barreling across the walkway. He shoots the first trooper, grabbing the man as he falls and practically throwing the body at the next trooper lined up on the walkway. Booster shoots the second trooper before he has time to recover and pushes past the fallen troopers sprawled across the metal structure. Another clone stands between him and the console platform. From the floor, Jysella watches as he ducks under a blow, twists around and punches the trooper clean off the ground. The clone shrieks as he pitches over the rail. The trooper that has her restrained leaps up to face Booster, who swings and misses before the clone manages to knock him against the wall. It gives her enough time to snatch up her blaster again and shoot the trooper who has Booster pinned down in the back.

Booster shoves the body aside and drops to his knees beside her on the ground. “Are you alright?” 

“I’m brilliant,” she laughs, wrapping her arms around his wide shoulders and pulling him down for a hard kiss.

He pulls away long before she’s done with him. “We need to go,” he reminds her and helps her to her feet, handing her her helm.

Shooting the console out before they leave is petty, but _satisfying._

Ellios’s voice crackles across the comms. “Escort ships incoming.” They’re done with Ellios’s ruse and are heading back toward the supply ship and the _Starwayman._

Jysella leaps into the _Starwayman’s_ access port, Booster right behind her. There’s a loud clanking sound behind them as the _Starwayman_ disengages, and a shudder as the ship eases away from its quarry. She tears off her helm and lets it fall. 

Llollulion chirps updates insistently in their comms as they run down the corridors of Booster’s ship to the cockpit. He already has the triad cannons online, but they could use a gunner to target the ships directly.

She and Booster both go for the captain’s chair, then freeze. There’s a heavy pause as Jysella locks eyes with Booster. This isn’t her ship, and Booster’s clearly a man who likes to be in charge, but if he thinks she’s going to back down—

Llollulion makes an impatient clacking noise. 

“I’ll take the guns,” Booster says, and disappears back down the corridor.

The captain’s chair doesn’t fit her quite right but the ship’s controls are familiar underneath her hands. She steers the _Starwayman_ away from the freighter, jostling aside the last few crates that Llollulion hadn’t managed to scoop up before they had to cut and run. Llollulion begins to punch in the hyperspace sequence as they flee toward the edge of the system. 

She’s barely cleared the gas planet’s orbit when Republic starfighters are on top of them, their canons strafing through the vacuum on either side of the ship.

She throws the _Starwayman_ into a spin, but the V-Wings swoop in closer, skillfully dodging the blasting triad canons. Not skillful enough. She hears Booster’s triumphant shout as he wings one of the fighters.

She makes a loop as though she’s going to take another run at the freighter, forcing one of the V-Wings to retreat in order to defend it. The _Starwayman_ jolts, and Jysella nearly slides out of the overly large captain’s chair, hands white on the controls, as they take a heavy hit from the second fighter.

“Kriff,” she hisses. They have a few more minutes before hyperspace. She flips the ship on its side, giving the top guns a clear shot of the lead fighter.

“Booster, _now!"_ Booster fires and Jysella whoops as the starfighter disintegrates in a burst of light.

“I’m going to marry that man,” she says.

Just before the view through the cockpit window splinters into the blue stream of hyperspace, she hears Ellios drawl over the comms: “Funny, he said the same thing about you.”

 

 **_“Two.” Two more seconds. She’s running out of time._ **

 

Jysella doesn’t miss it.

It’s been four years—nearly five—since Mirax was born. Jysella hasn’t handled a single piece of illicit cargo in all that time. She manages their legitimate shipping interests, and Booster handles the runs that aren’t, strictly speaking, legal. She rarely leaves the Corellian sector these days.

The business is doing well enough, but money has been tight. Jysella has never been good at handling it, and it all seems to pour in and pour out again. Booster puts his share right back into the business, and there’s still enough that they can live comfortably, if not excessively.

The game’s changed, anyway. New regime, new regulations, and fancy new warships to patrol the space lanes and enforce them. It’s harder to escape Imperial patrols, and Imperial regulations are stringent. Under the new regulations, the black market flourishes, and restricted goods are in high demand. The money’s better, but the big gangs have gotten stronger, too: Black Sun, the Zann Consortium; even the Hutt cartel’s influence reaches into the Core. They hunt in territory that isn’t even theirs, and they strike out at the competition with a ruthlessness that often ends in blood.

The Terriks keep a low profile.

Jysella knew that she’d have to sacrifice that part of her life to raise a child, and she doesn’t regret it. Mirax is the light and joy of Jysella’s life—and she’s a kriffing handful. Jysella doesn’t know how she managed to produce a child _even more_ stubborn than she is, but she finally understands her parents in ways she had never imagined.

Mirax gets into _everything._ She gets into the cooking supplies and covers the kitchen with flour; she somehow manages to open Jysella’s toolkit and scatters its contents all over the ship. She finds paints— _where did she find paints?_ —and leaves brightly colored handprints all over their apartment walls. Jysella doesn’t know how she _does_ it. Booster declares her his little artist. 

When she starts at the creche, she’s sent home for biting the other children. Her teachers explain that Mirax is a bright child, she just hasn’t figured out how to communicate her frustration in more appropriate ways, but Mirax learns to use biting strategically, and she manages to communicate to the other children that she isn’t to be trifled with. Jysella is almost proud.

When Mirax isn’t being a terror, and sometimes when she is, Jysella takes her to the Coronet City zoo. Mirax loves the zoo. They wander around the zoo complex, watching sinewy anoobas lope around a desert enclosure, bioluminescent butterflies from Ryloth flit through a nightscape garden, and blue-winged peko-pekos and Alderaanian pygmy thrantas coast across the domed aviary. There’s even a rancor, a massive, ugly beast that glowers at them from under the arch of its sculpted cave.

Mirax’s favorite are the sea bears, and she screams with laughter as the creatures swim back and forth in front of her, cavorting through the water behind thick transparasteel. She whines and drags her feet when it’s finally time to leave. Jysella promises her that if she’s good, they’ll go to Talus and her uncle—Jysella’s baby brother, who now has a family of his own—will take Mirax out on his boat and teach her to fish.

“Will we see sea bears?” Like her father, Mirax knows what she wants and get straight to the point. She does a little hop-skip on the sidewalk and shakes her head back and forth, just because she like the feel of her silky chin-length hair hitting her cheeks. It's adorable. 

“Maybe,” Jysella says. They won’t, but she doesn’t want to have that particular argument right now. “We’ll meet up with your daddy there.” Booster’s latest run should be wrapping up by the time they make it to Talus.

“Is he bringing me presents?” She bites her lip, looking just like her father.

“Yes,” Jysella can say with confidence. Booster spoils Mirax. “Into the speeder, sprat.”

Booster spoils her too, as though it will make up for the lonely months he’s away hauling cargo from the Core to the Outer Rim. Shortly after Mirax was born, he commissioned her sister to redesign the interior of a custom Baudo-class star yacht (acquired through less-than-reputable channels, naturally) so that he could present it to her on her name day.

Jysella loves the _Pulsar Skate_ more than anything she’s ever owned. A ship that belongs to her and her alone, a beauty with sleek lines and a powerful sublight drive that can take her anywhere in the galaxy—but she never gets further than Duro. She feels a bit like she’s swimming in circles on a tether that always pulls her back to Corellia.

She and Mirax take the _Pulsar Skate_ to Talus and meet Booster when he returns from a drop on Tatooine. They throw Booster a small reunion party at her parent’s place and then they rent a house on the coast for a few weeks before he has to leave again on his next run. Mirax goes fishing with her uncle. At night the waves crashing ceaselessly against the shore lulls them to sleep.

“Hey, Baby.” Booster leans against the frame of the door to their room.

He’s caught her with a map of the Corellian Trade Spine projected above her as she lays in their bed, tracing the route from Corellia to Terminus.

“Are you going to come back?” Booster asks her. She knows he’s torn; he wants to keep her safe and knows that she loves raising Mirax, even if it keeps them apart. That was her choice. It still is.

“I don’t miss it,” she says.

“I miss you.” His voice is soft.

She shifts to her side to look at him as he stands in the doorway. He looks good. The Tatooine run has given his skin a warm, healthy glow. It’s been so long since she set foot on that Hutt-infested dustball she almost misses it.

She can’t promise him _one more job,_ because they both know that soon as she’s back in the game in she’ll never leave his side again. Is that what she really wants? To go back to long hours waiting in seedy spaceports, living off ration bars and praying the Imperial patrols won’t stop you at customs this time, or the next time, or the time after that.

Jysella doesn’t miss any of that. She looks back at the map.

“There’s a new mining operation opening in the Anoat sector,” she says, tracing a line across the star map with a finger. “They’ll be bringing in workers and supplies through Gerrenthum and Nothoiin.” The holo-stars hover in the air above her like blue spark flies. 

The corner of his mouth twitches up. “Lots of opportunities to bring goods in and out that aren’t on the overseer’s supply list.”

“There are.” She lets her hand fall.

“Mirax is turning five,” he says. “We can leave her on Talus or Gus Tetra while we work.”

She clicks off the star map.

“Come to bed,” she says.

 

**_“One,” she breathes. It’s over._ **

 

Jysella slumps down the cold druasteel wall until she hits the floor, hand pressed to the blaster wound right below her ribs.

She’s not going to pass out. _She’s not._ The pain washes over her in waves, sometimes ebbing enough for her to think, and then rippling back with an intensity that nearly drives her under.

She’d been careful, and she’d still been caught. She’d tried to fight her way out, nearly making it out of the engine room before she’d been hit. The blood seeps through her fingers. The pain—the pain is worse than she ever expected. 

She’d snuck aboard Davix’s ship before it left the spaceport on Boonta, now an hour behind them by hyperspace. A minor Black Sun operative, Dravix runs shipments of spice between Kessel and Ord Mantell, and the security guarding his ships planet-side is soft. She and Booter have been tracking Davix’s shipments for months until they found a point on his run where they could intersect and take his cargo for themselves.

When Davix’s men had found her in the engine room, she was trying to disable—her vision blurs as the pain threatens to overwhelm her. The finer points of the plan are slipping away. It doesn’t matter now. Booster’s trailing Davix’s ship in the _Pulsar Skate,_ but as fast as the _Skate_ is, he’s too far behind to reach her time. They’d had close calls before, scrapes with rival gangs and with the law, but not like this—she isn’t going to make it this time.

The crewmen surrounding her in loose circle part to allow Davix to approach. She lets her head fall back against the bulkhead so that she can glare at up him. She’s always hated the cowardly bastard. He has a kriffing _terrible_ mustache. 

“The Terrik bitch,” Davix says, dropping to a knee so that he can look her in the eye. “You stole an ammunition shipment from us on Eriadu.”

It hurts to laugh but Jysella does it anyway. “The ammunition? We gave it all away to a rebel cell.”

Half a lie. She doesn’t remember that particular shipment, and while it may have ended up in rebel hands, they still charge for their services, no matter who they sell to, and more to the rebels. Getting tracked back to rebel groups is dangerous, and so for insurgents, they charge double.

His faces twists, and she braces herself for a blow, knowing that she probably won’t be able to remain conscious. He reaches for her belt instead, yanking out her comlink and thumbing it on.

“Jysella?” Booster’s voice calls through the comlink.

“Booster Terrik,” Davix drawls out with vicious relish. 

“Davix?”

“I’m afraid Jysella won’t be making it back.”

 _“Jysella?”_ Booster shouts down the line.

“I’m here,” she calls back, knowing that her voice is strained and sharp with pain.

“That gutshot looks pretty nasty, Booster. I don’t think she’s going to make it.”

A string of curses comes through the comm and Jysella nearly laughs again. “Don’t know my husband that well, do you, Davix? He’s going to _enjoy_ crushing you. With his bare hands.”

Davix gives her a nasty smile. “Too bad you won’t be there to see it.”

In his rage Booster bellows nearly incomprehensible Olys down the line. Davix’s men look uneasy at the thought of watching her bleed out. A few slink out of the room.

“I’m just sorry you won’t be here to see her die,” Davix says. “I want to you listen, Booter, I want you to _hear_ her die.” He presses the comm into her shaking hand, sneering in disgust as his fingers come away smeared with blood. Davix stands, wiping his hand on his thigh and turning on his heel. The blood is a dark streak across his pants. 

She hears “...airlock the body when it’s over” before he passes through the door. None of his men want to watch her die, and after a few minutes, they leave her alone. They have enough mercy left in them to leave her with the commlink.

“He really hates us, Booster,” she says. 

“Yeah, I know, baby.” Booster’s voice hisses over the comm. “Are you—are they still there?”

“It’s just me,” she says.

They’ve left her down here alone, unguarded, with the ship’s engine.

Stupid. So kriffing stupid.

There’s a queen’s ransom in spice onboard, and one of the Black Sun’s top lieutenants traveling along to make sure the shipment will reach its final destination. It won’t. 

Overloading an engine in this type of ship is simple if you know how to do it. She’s been messing around with engines since she was Mirax’s age. 

Mirax—

“Where’s Mirax? Is she safe?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line that makes her stomach drop in dread. The panic that rises up with the pain makes her head swim and she can’t remember where Mirax is—

“She’s safe,” Booster says. “We left her with Antilles, remember?”

Yes. Mirax is on Gus Tetra, safe. Her baby girl waiting for them, waiting for them to return with stories of their adventures and treats from far-off planets. She’s getting so tall, like she shoots up a few more inches every time her parents go away. They’ve been gone a lot, these last few years. She wishes she had spent more time with Mirax before—

She’s going to make them pay for that; she’s going to blow these Black Sun bastards to dust.

She grunts as she pushes herself to her feet and takes a few unsteady steps forward, her feet scraping along the floor. There’s a heavy bar lying in a corner that one of Davix’s men used to knock her down and then forgot in his hurry to leave the room. She uses it to jam the door to the engine room shut so she won’t be disturbed.

“I’m running the _Skate_ as hard as I can,” Booster says. “I’ll be there soon. Llollulion’s prepping the bacta right now.” He tells her the ship’s speed and relative distance and promises that he can get there even faster, which she knows isn't possible. "I'm coming for you." 

It won’t help her; she ignores him. 

With one hand still jammed against the wound in her side, comlink tucked under her thumb, and the other hand against the wall, she staggers back to the engine. First, she has to push the firing cells out of alignment, which is easy enough if you know how far to turn the tooling crank past safe limits. She focuses all of her attention on leaning down and turning the crank one-handed, then flipping the deadlock safety switch off. The rusty crank shrieks for a few seconds before it gives under her hand. 

An alarm starts to blare, and someone starts to pound on the door.

She has to rest, gasping, for a moment, before she has the energy to pull herself up and move over to the last set of switches. Her hand slips on the switches that deactivate the coolant vents, and she stares stupidly at her fingers.

 _Oh, the blood._ Her hands are slick with it.

Not much time now. Her bones will never lie at the bottom of the ocean.

“What are you doing, Jysa? What’s going on?”

“Over—overloading the engine.” Her voice has gone reedy and wavering.

“What? _No—”_

She tunes out his frantic protests as she hits the last sequence.

“Done,” she gasps out, stumbling back against the wall again and feeling herself slide to the floor. She keeps the engine pressure gauge in sight.

“No, Jysella, no.” His voice is rough, she thinks he’s crying. “Find an escape pod. I’ll come for you. You know I’ll come for you.”

“Babe,” she says softly. “There’s no escape pod for me.”

“Jysella—”

“I love you, Booster.” She cuts the line dead.

She begins to count down as she watches the gage rise higher as the engine overloads. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

When she closes her eyes she sees the ocean.

The noise of the engine room fades away until all she can hear is the murmur of waves and the sucking sound of the water lapping against the side of a boat. She thinks she hears a gull cry once, far off in the distance. The sky is cloudless above her head, the deep sapphire sea a vast expanse rippling out in every direction. On Talus days like this were rare; the sky was nearly always heavy and the ocean choppy, temperamental, and as grey as the sky above. She thinks the boat is her father’s small rowboat, cut from rough wooden boards and just large enough for her to lay back and take in the clear blue bowl of the sky as she drifts toward the limitless horizon.

 


End file.
